Data Artist

Iraq Death Dots – Visualizing Each Death in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs

I’ve been combing through the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs dataset and experimenting with different visualizations. This new one shows each individual death logged in the data. A single death is drawn as a single dot. The color of the dot indicates who was killed: either a civilian, a coalition soldier, an Iraqi soldier, or an enemy combatant. These classifications are taken directly from the military records, I did not categorize the data myself in any way. The dataset documents exactly 108,394 deaths, so exactly 108,394 dots are drawn.

Coalition soldiers are white dots, Iraqi forces are gray dots, enemy forces are blue dots, and civilians are red dots. At a glance you can see the shift from the heavy blue in the early days of the war to the overwhelming red. Let that soak in for a second. Every red dot is a civilian life.

Explore the visualization by selecting a different tab along the top (Years, Months, Incident Type, Category, Casualty Type) or by using the plus and minus buttons to zoom in and out of the visualization. I encourage you to experience the visualization in full screen (use the full-screen button on the bottom-right).

The data

This dataset uses the dataset produced by the Guardian, which filtered the full WIkileaks dataset to only include records with one or more deaths logged. It contains 52,048 records that document 108,394 deaths.

Please note that this data only contains incidents documented by Multi-National Force – Iraq and presents only a partial, incomplete record of the war. Please see this article about issues with this dataset.

Inspiration

Related:

In 1990 I was an eight year-old kid. And like most eight year-olds I spent a lot of time in front of my TV. But the summer of 1990 was different. Instead of cartoons I was watching the first Gulf War. The television media coverage of the war was everywhere.…

2 thoughts on “Iraq Death Dots – Visualizing Each Death in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs”

Nice work, Doug! Your pictures are worth a thousand words. The most striking thing to me was to sort by incident type and see that the great majority of civilians were killed by IEDs and murder, mostly murder. I’ve read a lot about this war and I didn’t know that. Thanks for putting this up. – S.